Vince Angelo died this week. Angelo's "The Angels" was one of the early doo-wop groups. Born in Hoboken in 1938 he made his first record in 1956. The A-side was "I Can't Wait (Can You?)." The B-side song was a marriage proposal to his 16 year old girlfriend Theresa Ciccolini. It became a huge teen hit. The chorus: "It'll be so fine/under stars above/when I make you mine/to treasure our love."

It created a stir when fans later learned that "The Angels," supposedly a quartet, was actually Angelo alone, who overdubbed the other parts.

Vince and Theresa married and the marriage lasted until his death. But his music career didn't and he opened a roofing company in New Jersey, from which he retired in 1999.

The couple had two children: Johnny and Lana, named after Johnny Stompanato and Lana Turner. Stompanato had been stabbed to death by Turner's daughter just a week before Vince and Theresa's wedding. The couple considered it a good omen.

Here is a fragment from a newly discovered 1888 letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother Theo. It was written during the period Vincent and Paul Gauguin shared lodgings at Arles:

"....I've had enough tsouris from that meshuggeneh Gauguin to last me a lifetime. I need this? He's always going on about moving to Tahiti. Tahiti, shmahiti. So move already! But last night I told him not to leave me in the lurch on the rent we owe for the house. What does he think? I can sublet midseason? Anyway we had words and Gauguin stormed out. Probably went to drink absinthe with some nafka. Came home early this morning.

Tonight I'm going to serve a nice gedempte fleisch and try to smooth things over..."

Some scholars now suggest this proves once and for all Van Gogh was Jewish, something that has been in dispute for many years.

From Mel Brooks:

"You're standing in front of two movie theaters. One is showing a movie called The Typhoon and the other has It's Drizzling. Which are you going to pay to see?"

I can't think of anything to blog about today, except the fact that I can't think of anything to blog about.

Bonita's interest in his work led me in the 90s to read Michel Foucault and about him. I got a sense of where he was going generally but, to be candid, I never could muster the patience to follow his work all the way home. Although what I did manage to work though at the very least provided some cogent reinforcment of my natural suspicion of all institutions.

But there was one Foucault anecdote that has remained with me. In the early 1960s Foucault was teaching at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. The Communist philosopher Roger Garaudy also came to teach there--and he and Foucault ended up at serious loggerheads. I believe they even had physical altercations.

Finally in frustration Garaudy demanded to know the reason for Foucault's animosity. Was it personal?

Foucault replied: "I have nothing against you personally, just against stupidity!"

I just thought of perfect names for two Icelandic brothers: "Gad" and "Egad."

From pretentious overpriced restaurants to loathsome Broadway musicals to books by academic divorcees on voyages of self-discovery in Italy, the New York Times breathlessly champions everything I think meretricious in our culture.

I'm coming to believe that the editors of the Times know my taste and deliberately try to insult it!